Eating

I'm going to post two entries today, because I feel they're pretty different topics.

First, eating. I'm convinced that I've been eating significantly less lately, since the spider bite (or there around). Let me tell you why, I didn't run out of food last week. In fact, I have about half of last week's food left, even staples like pasta and eggs and fruit and cheese.

You see, each week I only buy about as much food as I think I will eat for the next week (except for meat, which I buy two weeks' worth of, and things like olive oil and spices). So, if I'm eating about half of that in a week, that's a pretty significant decrease in food intake. I've also noticed that I'm tending toward eating only two real meals a day, with  maybe a third small meal/snack.

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure why this is happening. It could be that my body is changing, it could be because I was sick. It could be because of the antibiotics, or maybe the topamax. But here's the thing, the bite is almost entirely healed, I haven't taken the antibiotics in two days, and I haven't taken the topamax in 4 or 5 (which is more days than I took it).

So, is the lack of appetite the left over meds in my system, or the left over toxins or just a change in my own body?

I don't know.

Part of me is happy about this. The upside is that I'm not hungry as often. Not being hungry is nice as being hungry is unpleasant. Also, if this persists it means I might actually be able to keep within my food budget when I move. That's a nice prospect.

Part of me is uncomfortable with this. First, your body needs food to provide itself with vitamins and nutrients, if you're not eating much, you're not getting those important vitamins and nutrients. Second, I hope I've made this clear in previous posts, but I think that our culture/country's obsession with cutting calories is absolute bullshit. In fact, I think that cutting calories can cause the metabolism to slow and can cause malnutrition. I believe that it's our intake of "artificial" foods and specifically of processed sweeteners (both caloric and non-caloric) that have cause the "obesity epidemic." I think that the entire "obesity epidemic" campaign is a giant fucking red herring to redirect blame at the subjects suffering rather than at the businesses and policies that support produce and peddle and distribute the products causing the suffering.

Additionally, and especially, I believe that if you are physically active, exercise regularly, get enough sleep, love yourself, are socially proactive, as psychologically healthy as you are presently able to be, practice stress reduction techniques, and eat a diet largely free of processed foods and sweeteners than you are healthy. Healthy and beautiful. And you have a right to live in light of that knowledge. It doesn't matter what weight you are. If you're living like that and your weight drops, great, if your weight stays the same, great, if you weight goes up, great (maybe you're building muscle, maybe you were too skinny). I think that body-hatred and self-hatred is far more destructive to a life than extra weight is to health.

Soooooooo, when I look at my own body and see that I went 10 hours without eating on Saturday and was fine with it, I'm not sure I'm fine with it, but it's definitely keeping costs down.

P.S. This is a link to a really great infographic about the average calories someone in a variety of countries consumes in a day (the results will surprise you, particularly considering that the diet industry is telling women that they should eat between 1200 and 1500 calories a day for the rest of their life) that I think everyone should look at and a lot of the comments are quite good as well.

Sick and or; a Health Update

Well, I've been having problems with tiredness and headaches and feelings of pressure in my face so I went to the doctor on Wednesday (Thursday? Wednesday? Gosh, I can't remember). I also talked to her about my migraines and asked if I might get some Topamax as it had helped me previously and helped my mom. She voiced some concern about the Topamax as I only get migraines a few times a month so I didn't think she'd written me a prescription for it, but when I got to the pharmacy she had. She also said I might have a sinus infection (or the allergies this year are going to kill me. Really, I have been eating raw, very local, honey for a year, has it not helped at all?) so I got antibiotics. She prescribed some nasal spray which I didn't buy because it was $30. O.o No, not paying that much for a bloody nasal spray. I have a saline spray I can use.

Then on Friday night I noticed a bite on my arm (my father, who used to be an RN, says it looks like a spider bite). It was pretty itchy by Saturday so I took two Benadryl last night.

So, to recap, last night was Amoxicillin, Benadryl, Topamax. Today the bite is bigger and itchier. I now have a circle drawn around it. It doesn't seem to be responding like cellulitis (heat is making it much much worse, not better) so I hope it isn't. I feel like my head is on a balloon. Very very dizzy and disoriented, but no fever.

My arm itches, and itches like mad if I start to move much.

Trying to make it to 8 pm before I got back to bed.

This is what the bite had become by day 3